In matters of religion, Helena seems to have been somewhat of an eighteenth-century rationalist. She steps easily in and out of superstition, reason, belief and disbelief, without much adolescent worrying. She would never for a moment doubt, one feels, that the church is “a good thing.” With all its holidays, processions, mast-raisings, and fireworks, its christenings, first communions and funerals, it is the fountain-head of the town’s social life. Her father remains in the background, smiling but tolerant, while her mother pleads with him to go to church and constantly prays for all the family. Like him, Helena is at first skeptical of a schoolmate who dies and acquires a reputation for working miracles; then she veers towards her mother’s party. Her religion, like her feeling for nature, is on the practical side.
She lives in a world of bitter poverty and isolation. A trip to the capital, Rio de Janeiro, where a few boys go to study, takes ten days: eight on mule-back to Sabará, and from there two days by very slow train to Rio. Supplies are brought to town by the drovers, on long lines of mules or horses. One of the greatest problems is what to do with the freed slaves who have stayed on. Reading this diary, one sometimes gets the impression that the greater part of the town, black and white, “rich” and poor, when it hasn’t found a diamond lately, gets along by making sweets and pastries, brooms and cigarettes and selling them to each other. Or the freed slaves are kept busy manufacturing them in the kitchen and peddling them in the streets, and the lady of the house collects the profits — or buys, in her parlor, the products of her kitchen.
Now that I can join in my friends’ exchanges of anecdotes from the book, and have seen Diamantina, I think that one of my own favorite entries is Helena’s soliloquy on November 5th, 1893, on the meaning of Time (her style improves in the later years):
“The rooster’s crow never gives the right time and nobody believes it. When a rooster crows at nine o’clock they say that a girl is running away from home to get married. I’m always hearing the rooster crow at nine o’clock, but it’s very rarely that a girl runs away from home.
“Once upon a time I used to believe that roosters told the time, because in Boa Vista when you ask a miner the time he looks at the sun and tells you. If you go and look at the clock, he’s right. So I used to think that the sun kept time during the day and the rooster at night. Now I realize that this was a mistake.…
“In Cavalhada only the men have watches. Those who live in the middle of the town don’t feel the lack of them because almost all the churches have clocks in their towers. But when papa isn’t home the mistakes we make about the hours are really funny.… The rooster is mama’s watch, which doesn’t run very well. It’s already fooled us several times.” She goes on to tell about “mama’s” waking her and Luizinha up to go to four o’clock Mass, because the rooster has already crowed twice. They drink their coffee and start out. “I kept looking at the moon and the stars and saying to mama, ‘This time the Senhora’s going to see whether the rooster can tell time or not.’ The street was deserted. The two of us walked holding onto mama’s arms. When we passed by the barracks the soldier on duty looked at mama and asked, ‘What’s the Senhora doing in the street with these little girls at this hour?’ Mama said, ‘We’re going to Mass at the Cathedral.’ The soldier said, ‘Mass at midnight? It isn’t Christmas eve. What’s this all about?’
“I was afraid of the soldier. Mama said, ‘Midnight? I thought it was four o’clock. Thank you very much for the information.’
“We went home and lay down in our clothes. But even so we missed Mass. When we got to church later Father Neves was already in the Hail Marys.”
I like to think of the two tall, thin little girls hanging onto their mother’s arms, the three figures stumbling up the steep streets of the rocky, lightless little town beneath the cold bright moon and stars; and I can hear the surprised young soldier’s voice, mama’s polite reply, and then three pairs of footsteps scuttling home again over the cobblestones.
Food
The staple diet of Brazil consists of dried black beans and rice, with whatever meat, beef or pork, salted or fresh, can be afforded or obtained. And black beans, instead of the “bread” of other countries, seem to be equated with life itself. An example of this: when the Brazilian football team went to play in the Olympic Games recently, thirty-three pounds of black beans were taken along for each man. And recently in Rio the court ordered a taxi-driver to pay alimony to his wife and children in the form of twenty-two pounds of rice and twenty-two pounds of black beans monthly.
They are boiled separately and seasoned with salt and pepper, garlic, and lard. The common vegetables, such as pumpkin, okra, couve (a kind of cabbage), are usually made into stews with small quantities of meat or chicken. As in other Catholic countries, salt codfish is a common dish. But black beans and rice form the basis of the main meal, the heavy lunch, usually served early, between eleven and half-past twelve. At the time of the diary lunch was even earlier, at half-past ten or eleven, and dinner was eaten at three or four o’clock. This explains why everyone is always ready to eat again in the evenings.
A dish of roasted manioc flour is always served with the beans and rice, indeed it is what the unqualified word “flour” signifies. It is sprinkled over the food, to thicken the sauce, and perhaps to add a little textural interest to the monotonous diet, since its nutritional value is almost nothing. It is also used in making various cakes and pastries. There is an impressive variety of these in Brazil, using manioc and cornmeal as well as wheat flours, coconut, brown sugar, etc., each with its own name, frequently religious in origin and varying from region to region. Helena mentions a dozen or more and there are whole books on the subject. Desserts are often pudims, usually, or unusually, heavy, and a great variety of fruit pastes, guava, quince, banana, etc., served with a small piece of hard white cheese. On a good Brazilian table, desserts appear, or always used to, several at a time. Cinnamon is the universal spice. Most Brazilians have very sweet tooths.
Breakfast is simply coffee, black or with boiled milk, and a piece of bread, although Helena varies hers strangely with cucumbers. Coffee is served after the other meals, at intervals in the day, and inevitably to callers at any time, in the form of cafezinhos, “little coffees,” black, boiling hot, and with the tiny cup half-filled with sugar. (The sugar is only partially refined so it takes quite a lot to sweeten a cup.) It is made by stirring the very finely ground coffee into boiling water, then pouring it through a coffee bag. These brown-stained bags and their high wooden stands are a symbol of Brazil, like black beans, and they are seen everywhere, even in miniature, as toys. There are laws to ensure that the coffee served in the innumerable cafés is unadulterated and of the required strength. (In an American movie being shown in Rio a character was told that he’d feel better after he had “a good breakfast, porridge and bacon and eggs and coffee,” and this speech was rendered by the Portuguese sub-title, “Come and take coffee.”)
A glance at the photographs will perhaps explain what may seem like Helena’s over-emphasis on fruit, or unnatural craving for it. Through June, July, and August, the long dry winters in that stony region, when everything is covered with red dust, with a constant shortage of fresh vegetables and the only drinking water running in open gutters as it was at that time, “sucking oranges” must have been the best way to quench one’s thirst, and stealing fruit an almost irresistible impulse.
Money